The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) challenges you to make an original video, up to five (5) minutes long, demonstrating a concept about the brain that could be used as a teaching tool or resource. Whether it's through animation, song, or reenactment, share the wonders of science through the Brain Awareness Video Contest.

Brain Awareness Week (BAW) is an inspirational global campaign that unites those who share an interest in elevating public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain and nervous system research.

Top prize is $1,000 and a free trip to Washington DC, plus complimentary registration to Neuroscience 2011 [up to $650 in value!]! You needn't be a member of SfN to enter the contest, but your video must be submitted by a member.

Fig. 1 (Fisher et al., 2010). Group regional activation specific to the rejector stimulus in reward systems and other areas. A: axial view. Ventral tegmental area (VTA, right arrow). The VTA regions overlap those affected when looking at a lover while happily in love (Aron et al., 2005). The cross hair (middle arrow) marks an area of activation that includes the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum.

It is important to understand how mesocorticolimbic mechanisms generate positive versus negative motivations. Dopamine (DA) in the nucleus accumbens is well known as a mechanism of appetitive motivation for reward. However, aversive motivations such as pain, stress, and fear also may involve dopamine in nucleus accumbens (at least tonic dopamine signals).

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Does romantic love manipulate women into providing free domestic labor and sexual favors for men? Some feminist views of romantic love [and the institution of marriage] portray it as controlling and oppressive (Burns, 2000):

‘STOP HUMAN SACRIFICE. END MARRIAGE NOW.’ ‘IT STARTS WHEN YOU SINK IN HIS ARMS AND ENDS WITH YOUR ARMS IN HIS SINK.’ From a feminist perspective, romantic love was, and is, seen to obscure or disguise gender inequality and women’s oppression in intimate heterosexual relationships.

But some in the men's movement see romantic love as dangerous for men as well as women, because it prevents men from being vulnerable (Bloodwood, 2003):

...historically, romantic love has been a highly gendered but workable deal in which men provide women with social status and material goods while women provide men with sex/affective labour. Thus romantic relationships not only reinforce women’s second class status but also reinforce men’s lack of sex/affective autonomy, so that romantic love is equally dangerous for women and for men.

Furthermore, romantic love is often portrayed as a relatively recent construct that is specific to Western societies. A cross-cultural study by Jankowiak and Fischer (1992) claimed that:

The anthropological study of romantic (or passionate) love is virtually nonexistent due to the widespread belief that romantic love is unique to Euro-American culture. This belief is by no means confined to anthropology. The historian Philippe Aries (1962), for example, argues that affection was of secondary importance to more utilitarian ambitions throughout much of European history.

However, their own analysis of the ethnographic literature found that romantic love (however ill-defined) could be observed in 147 out of 166 societies, including 77% in Sub-Saharan Africa and 94% in East Eurasia (Jankowiak & Fischer, 1992). Likewise, evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher and colleagues suggest that romantic love evolved as one of three motivational brain systems for mating, reproduction, and parenting (Fisher et al., 2002).

The biological concept that romantic love (or attraction) is an emotional/motivational system in the human brain has prompted some neuroimaging investigators to search for its elusive neural correlates. How do you measure long-term intense romantic love in an fMRI experiment? Researchers have adopted the practical (yet flawed) strategy of examining the hemodynamic response to viewing pictures of a partner with whom participants were "madly in love".

So are the "neural correlates of romantic love" the same in non-Western, non-heterosexual participants? Two recent papers attempted to spread the love to include diverse "others" (Xu et al., 2011; Zeki & Romaya, 2010). Is the simple act of asking if the Chinese and teh gays are "just like us" when it comes to love offensive? I'll let you be the judge.

Although the original study of Bartels and Zeki (2000) recruited an ethnically and culturally diverse group of subjects, all were heterosexual. Zeki and Romaya (2010) wanted to extend this work to include romantically involved gay participants. This time, they included 12 females (6 in straight and 6 in lesbian relationships) and 12 males (6 in straight and 6 in gay relationships) in their fMRI experiment. I won't belabor the methods [and the critiques thereof] here, but will refer the reader to Posterior Hippocampus and Sexual Frequency.1

As for differences between the groups, there were none: no main or interactive effects of gender or sexual orientation. The results were the same for gay and straight, male and female participants [but remember that the numbers were very low, n=6 for each of the four cells]. So this particular [underpowered] study suggests that "the romantic love brain circuit" (i.e., familiarity, attention, memory, reward, etc. activity associated with looking at your partner's face) is not restricted to heterosexuals. Did they really expect anything different? Actually not, Zeki and Romaya predicted a null effect.

However, the authors themselves note the difficulties inherent in their entire endeavor:

We begin by emphasizing that any study of so complex and overpowering a sentiment as love is fraught with difficulties. Chief among these is that the sentiment itself involves many components – erotic, emotional, and cognitive – that are almost impossible to isolate from the overall sentiment of love. ... While acknowledging this difficulty, we tried as best we could to circumvent it, by applying a uniform criterion – that of a loved face – for studying the brain's love system. Another problem is the difficulty of controlling the mental processes that occur when subjects view their lovers' faces. The only way to address this is through the statistical methods we have used to analyze our results. We have employed a random effects analysis using the summary statistic approach to control for the between-subject variation in our sample.

Finally, to complete our neurological query on the universal nature of romantic love, how about the cross-cultural findings? What were the results in 18 heterosexual Han Chinese students recruited from Beijing Normal College (Xu et al., 2011)? Why, the same VTA and caudate regions were activated by the beloved!

The findings of this study of early stage intense romantic love in China suggest that (a) highly similar patterns of reward system activation in response to one's beloved are found in Chinese as in the United States...

There were however some differences, namely in the orbitofrontal cortex:

Thus, it is possible that Chinese participants may engage orbitofrontal systems and afferents, weigh the relationship more carefully, and take negative aspects into account more readily than Western participants (orbitofrontal cortex activation was not found in US and UK samples)...

What does all this mean for the question posed in title of this post? We can't answer it, at least as far as the brain is concerned. We can't go back in time and scan people from the past, obviously. How about recruiting individuals who live in the 11.5% of societies where romantic love was not reported? Good luck with that.

I'll leave you with a novel control experiment. None of the studies have compared gazing at the partner's face to a condition I'll call "the most desired celebrity." Have the participants in this devious new study view a picture of who they consider the single hottest actor, and see how well the beloved holds up against Brad or Angelina [for instance]. Dare you tell your partner the outcome of this little experiment?

Footnote

1 There were some minor differences in stimulus presentation parameters between Zeki's and Aron's groups, but we'll skip those for now.

Now there's an unexpected correlation suitable for Valentine's Day. How romantic! Actually, it is romantic because the neuroimaging study by Acevedo et al. (2011) is entitled "Neural correlates of long-term intense romantic love." How do you quantify long-term intense romantic love in an fMRI experiment?

Well, what the study really examined is the brain's hemodynamic response to viewing pictures of a spouse with whom participants were still "madly in love" after an average of 21 years. Over the course of the experiment, subjects repeatedly viewed four different digital photos: Partner, Close Friend (CF), Highly Familiar "Neutral" acquaintance (HFN), and a Low-Familiar Neutral acquaintance (LFN). Specifically,

The protocol implemented a block design of two 12-min sessions each consisting of six sets of four 30-s tasks in an alternating fashion, followed by stimulus ratings. Each session included two alternating images (starting image counterbalanced), interspersed with a count-back task. Duplicating procedures of Aron et al. (2005), Session 1 displayed Partner and HFN images. For the additional control comparisons, Session 2 displayed CF and LFN images. Participants were instructed to think about experiences with each stimulus person, nonsexual in nature.

Yeah, it might be a problem if the participants remembered bouts of sex when they viewed their partners... Fig. 2D shows that activation in a tiny area of the left posterior hippocampus correlated with sexual frequency. The two outliers who had sex every day (or nearly every day)1 could be driving the correlation -- they certainly had a greater number of memories to choose from, and to suppress. In humans, activity in the posterior hippocampus is sensitive to the familiarity of stimuli that have behavioral relevance (Strange et al., 1999), and is associated with memory for repeated stimuli (Poppenk et al., 2010).

Although little is known about the posterior hippocampal region [NOTE: untrue], some studies have shown increased activation in this area in association with hunger and food craving (LaBar et al., 2001; Pelchat et al., 2004), with particularly greater activity shown in obese individuals (Bragulat et al., 2010).

Craving, eh? Not memory? Although the authors would like to think they controlled for familiarity with the Close Friend contrast, it seems to me nearly impossible that a co-worker, sibling, cousin, or friend could fulfill all familiarity criteria except romantic relationship. Furthermore, most of the analyses focused on comparisons between Partner vs. Highly Familiar Neutral 2 to match their previous paper (Aron et al., 2005) on the early stages of romantic love (1-17 months in duration).

I could go on about the analysis methods, and whether reporting the single voxel with highest activity is appropriate [see Voodoo Correlations]. Or I could go on about the subject selection criteria: the 17 heterosexual participants (10 women, 7 men, ages 39-67 yrs, married 10-29 yrs) had an annual household income ranging from $100,000-$200,000 (perhaps not representative of the general population).

But what about the main findings? Am I just being a cynic when it comes to love? It's true, some of the expected dopamine/reward areas [ventral tegmental area (VTA) and substantia nigra (SN)] showed greater activation when looking at the long-term Partner, which was very much like what was seen in the young lovers.

Ultimately, the paper sends a positive message that in certain relationships, the exciting, obsessive, and rewarding period of intense romantic love can last for over 20 yrs, well beyond the typical and oft-cited (oprah.com)3 18 month to 3 year duration:

IMPLICATIONSIndividuals in long-term romantic love showed patterns of neural activity similar to those in early-stage romantic love. These results support theories proposing that there might be mechanisms by which romantic love is sustained in some long-term relationships. For example, the self-expansion model suggests that continued expansion and novel, rewarding events with the beloved may promote increases in romantic love. Novel, rewarding experiences may use dopamine-rich systems (Schultz, 2001; Guitart-Masip et al., 2010) similar to those activated in this study.

Beyond reporting relationship length (and sexual frequency), the participants filled out questionnaires including the Passionate Love Scale, the Love Attitudes Scale, the inclusion of other in the self (IOS) Scale, and the friendship-based love scale. All indicators suggested that the subjects were still "madly in love" with their partners. Did we really need neuroimaging to tell us that? Maybe...

Imagine that fMRI had been invented in the 1860s rather than the 1990s. Instead of being based on modern cognitive psychology, neuroimaging would instead be based on the faculty psychology of Thomas Reid and Dugald Steward, which provided the mental “faculties” that Gall and the phrenologists attempted to map onto the brain. Researchers would have presumably jumped from phrenology to fMRI and performed experiments manipulating the engagement of particular mental faculties or examining individual differences in the strength of the faculties. They almost certainly would have found brain regions that were reliably engaged when a particular faculty was engaged and potentially would also have found regions in which activity correlated with the strength of each faculty across subjects.

Gall's ambition and vanity are now 'activation for judgment about self versus others', localized to medial prefrontal cortex. Friendly attachment/fidelity have been transformed into 'viewing a friend versus viewing a stranger', associated with right temporoparietal cortex.

Although few today would hold that 19th century faculty psychology is an accurate description of the structure of the mind, we can likely all agree that if the phrenologists had created task manipulations to isolate their proposed faculties using fMRI, something would have “lit up.” What would the patterns of activation associated with these faculties have looked like? If we believe, as I think most would agree, that each of the phrenologists' putative faculties relies in actuality upon a combination of basic mental operations, then we would likely expect that the maps obtained for a given faculty would include a large set of activated regions that would tend to overlap across tasks meant to tap into different faculties. Regardless, one can be almost certain that Gall and his contemporaries would have taken these neuroimaging results as evidence for the biological reality of his proposed faculties.

The studies show that network interactions among anatomically discrete brain regions underlie cognitive processing and dispel any phrenological notion that a given innate mental faculty is based solely in just one part of the brain.

According to Poldrack (2010), neuroimaging research strategies have evolved from “where” (blobology or neophrenology) to “what” (characterize function of a specific brain region) to “fractionation” (determine whether different mental processes engage different brain regions). Ultimately, localization of function is still the final goal... as it was for the original phrenologists:

Phrenology teaches us that in this life every act of the mind is performed through the instrumentality of the brain, and that peculiar states of this organ invariably accompany particular mental dispositions.

Thursday, February 03, 2011

Johnson & Johnson, Sony, Mastercard and Kleenex Most Desired Brands for WomenAmazon Beats Walmart as the Most Desired RetailerBMW, Hyundai and Lexus Among Most Desired Brands for Men

February 2, 2011 (New York, NY) – Johnson & Johnson, Sony, Crest and BMW appear at the top of the First Annual "Most Desired Brands in the U.S." Report. The report, released by leading global strategic neuromarketing firm Buyology Inc, is the first to quantitatively type and measure consumer relationships with brands. The full report can be found at www.buyologyinc.com.

The Most Desired U.S. Brands Report is the result of more than 6 years and $8 million, testing 240 global brands with more than 5000 consumers.

Here are the top 5:

Rank

Women

Men

#1

Johnson & Johnson

Crest

#2

Sony

BMW

#3

Kleenex

National Geographic

#4

National Geographic

Panasonic

#5

MasterCard

Hyundai

The Brand Most Desired by Men in the U.S. is Crest? Hyundai (#5) is more desirable than Lexus (#10)? Really? Roger Dooley discussed these and some of the other less predicted [i.e., completely surprising] findings at his Neuromarketing blog, noting that "The actual methodology used to produce this brand ranking is a bit sketchy."

Neurotypes™ quantitatively determine which of sixteen relationships a brand or business currently has for a given target audience and the relative strength of the relationship, or signal strength, relative to competitors and other, beacon brands who, although they may be outside the category, have successfully established similar relationships. Once typed and calibrated, a marketer can use Neurotypes to assess the impact of their current marketing activities, determine what activities will be more effective in the future and gain provocative and proprietary insights on how to strengthen the brand's relationships across the 6P framework (product, package, placement (distribution), price, promotion and positioning).

The Neurotype™ matrix yields a few surprises of its own. Taco Bell relates to its audience through Superiority and Harmony [just like Apple]. In contrast, Crest exploits the winning combination of Harmony and Superiority. Wal-Mart has a relationship of Exploration and Harmony with its customers [just like Facebook].

Each of these chemistry types is associated with a dominant neurotransmitter or hormone (serotonin, testosterone, dopamine, estrogen), according to resident anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher. Although a simplistic caricature of personality differences, at least the proposed biological correlates are obvious.

About Me

Born in West Virginia in 1980, The Neurocritic embarked upon a roadtrip across America at the age of thirteen with his mother. She abandoned him when they reached San Francisco and The Neurocritic descended into a spiral of drug abuse and prostitution. At fifteen, The Neurocritic's psychiatrist encouraged him to start writing as a form of therapy.